Richard Wood column: The Rotherham United defender recalls his best and worst of high-scoring games

Borussia Dortmund beat Legia Warsaw 8-4 on Tuesday night in the highest-scoring Champions League game in history. The goals certainly flew in and at half-time it was already 5-2!

Games like these are incredibly entertaining to watch and are a brilliant advert for football.

Wood back in his Sheffield Wednesday days

This amazing scoreline got me reminiscing about matches I’ve been involved in where there were goals galore.

The first game that springs to mind was my full league debut for Sheffield Wednesday back in 2003. I was a spring chicken at 17 years old, very skinny and, if I remember rightly, quick, sharp and agile, traits I still hold today (I can hear the laughs as you read).

The Owls had been consigned to relegation from Division One (now the Championship) the week before and we travelled to Burnley for the last away game of the season. I found out only on the morning of the game I would be starting because Danny Maddix had to withdraw through illness.

I couldn’t have dreamed of a better debut. We won the game 7-2 and I even scored. From the pictures of me scoring and the newspaper reports, it looks and sounds as though I blasted a right-foot bicycle kick into the roof of the net. In truth, as the ball came across to me, I slipped and shanked the ball into the ground. With the keeper already diving, it slowly bounced over him and into the net. It was one of the luckiest goals you’ll see, but I’ll take that all day long!

Even though the club had been relegated, I was on cloud nine. That scoreline will stay with me forever.

My most humiliating defeat was again while playing for Wednesday. We lost 6-0 away to Reading on a Tuesday night in the 2008 season. Every one of us had an absolute nightmare and, although I’d love to erase it from my memory, it still haunts me today.

I’m never one for excuses and don’t like using them,but we had a pretty good one for this game.

Normally, when travelling a long distance for a game, the team set off the day before and stay over in a hotel. This is a common occurrence in football and preparation is key. At professional level, you do not want to be travelling for several hours and then go straight into a football match.

For some reason, we travelled on the day of the game.

There were huge traffic jams all the way down to Berkshire and it took us seven hours to get there.

It’s not ideal preparation for a game, but you get on with it, and we were told beforehand not to make it an excuse.

We conceded two goals in the first ten minutes and then endured another painful 80 minutes.

It’s safe to say that, in the dressing room afterwards, we all were complaining about the travelling!

Another high-scoring game I’ve been involved in was the Millers’ defeat against Morecombe this season. The least said about that the better.